this post was submitted on 30 Jun 2024
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Showerthoughts
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The birth rates are low because of the terrible environment that doesn't support having and raising children. All you're doing is importing more people who will also barely have any children within a generation or so. Mass immigration is just throwing bodies at the bottom of the pyramid scheme. You can see this in action in Canada where housing is absolutely unaffordable, but large numbers of immigrants are brought in who have to work for shitty wages and live with multiple families in a single rental unit.
The screaming about low birth rate is because corporations want to keep a high labor pool so they can drive down the price of labor while keeping up demand for consumption.
It's not only that. By the time you want to retire, there won't be enough people to pay taxes for your retirement fund. With more young people than old, that is less of a problem.
This is one area where we're supposed to benefit from the greatly increased automation. We don't need a huge mass of people doing make-work. The current situation is that we force people to do make-work to continue making on-paper profits which mostly go to a tiny set of wealthy people. The current situation is unsustainable even if population growth increased because it's a pyramid scheme. The system relies on infinite growth.
Poor countries, such as the countries people are immigrating from, have a more terrible environment and higher birth-rates.
The problem is that birthdate is dropping even faster in those countries. An even bigger “problem” is that in general life is getting better, even in developing countries. There is no infinite supply of immigrants waiting to save the developed world.
Encouraging immigration is far from a panacea. It will work for a few countries, for another generation or so, but you can see the end of that coming
But isn't it better to have a few years but then growth vs absolute death spiral due to low population which we would have to increase immigration for regardless
The problem is that most of the growth goes to the already rich as they pay immigrants poorly and make them pay high rents (hence the need to have multiple families living in a single unit). It's still a death spiral, just with higher profits for the rich few. The only way to make it not a death spiral is to force the rich leeches to stop sucking the blood out of everyone else.